


we're on each other's team

by coffeeandoranges



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, House Stark, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandoranges/pseuds/coffeeandoranges
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>three stark children and their paramours. set post-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're on each other's team

I. Arya 

 

For a brief period of time, her brother and sister consider marrying her off.

Mainly it is Sansa’s plot: Arya will wed a Karstark, patch up old wounds, soak up old blood. Of course this is the work of her sister, who always has one finger licked and held up to the wind; watching and scheming, she is a woman who will never be careless again. But Arya is still a little bit careless, and she does not want to wed a Karstark. She yells until her voice is hoarse, and does not speak to Sansa for a fortnight.

In the interrim she flies into the night, beyond the walls of Winterfell. The castle feels safe now, but the wild darkness outside feels safer still, particularly when night means a tall young smith with eyes that shine brightest beside a bonfire, under an open sky.

It is only around him she can be weak.

She never cries, but she does fall against his chest and makes noises that would shame her elsewhere, that she would never admit to; she murmurs his name. His hands are hesitant against her dull and tangled hair, but they draw her in, once she leans up to kiss him with a wolf’s appetite. As she finally pulls away, she sees herself reflected in his eyes, right there in that deep blue, covered in dirt and more than just a little feral. But alive, and all in one piece.

“I belong with you,” she tells him one night, when he asks her why she comes.

Gendry’s lips twist sadly at that, because he knows he has nothing to give a Lady of Winterfell. No money, no land, no title, barely even a name.

But Arya’s had so many names, she’s not sure she wants one anymore.

When she returns to Winterfell, it is as a woman wed, and then even Sansa has to concede defeat.

 

 

II. Jon 

 

There is no real reason for Jon to love Tyrion, if love is even the word for it.

It just kind of happens, when they see each other for the first time in a decade, since Jon was no more than a bastard at a feast and Tyrion no more than the Imp.

Looking at Tyrion now is rather like looking into the sun. Jon sees bright spots, hears a crackle of a mighty and all-consuming heat.

Under that gaze, Jon might be Westeros watching Aegon the Conqueror. Waiting for his next move.

Or he might be a warrior, and Tyrion the world’s deadliest weapon, aimed at Jon’s head and already bloody.

Jon is no fool. He knows this is not the man he met at the feast, this is just what has survived. This was once the least of the lions, the one they all jeered at, but their laughter died when he ripped their throats out, one by one.

Every one of this man’s enemies underestimated him, and every single one is now dead.

No one would dare challenge this Tyrion Lannister, a man whose smile is just teeth, sharp as Jon’s greatsword.

Sharper.

As Ygritte taught him, some part of Jon is always thirsty for a little danger.

 

 

 

III. Sansa

 

The first time she saw Margaery Tyrell, Sansa was a little girl. A babe in the woods, handing out flowers from her basket to every monster she met.

She was oblivious then. She didn’t know that some monsters conceal themselves in sweetness and softness, like roses hiding their thorns.

But the years that follow teach Sansa many things.

 

The next time she sees Margaery Tyrell, Margaery is a prisoner, held in the black cell the Dragon Queen has placed her in. Her brown hair has fallen out of its curls, and she is ghost-thin and waning.

But Sansa Stark is still beautiful, perhaps more so now; clad in ice-blue silk, she is the Lady of the Vale and Warden of the North, widow of Harrold Hardyng and Robert Arryn and Petyr Baelish— by now, she’s married at least as many would-be kings as Margaery ever did. But the difference between them is that Sansa’s schemes were not entirely her own, though she made them her own once she killed Petyr and survived Sweetrobin and Harry the Heir, and the other difference is that Sansa’s scheming has worked out in the end, and Margaery’s has not.

“Sweet girl,” murmurs Margaery when the Queen in the North enters. Looking at up at her captor, her eyes are large with an expression Sansa never thought to see there: fear.

Margaery is pleading with her.

She thinks I still believe her family betrayed me, Sansa realizes, as she bends down to cup Margaery’s pale cheek. She thinks I hate her.

Worse, Sansa is not sure Margaery’s suspicions are untrue. The Tyrells plotted and used her and abandoned her, after all.

She has not forgotten.

Sansa does not know this, but her touch does not comfort her old friend. In fact, Sansa’s long, elegant fingers are like ice on Margaery’s cheek, and her blue silks sweep heavily across the floor in her wake, like a shroud. All Margaery sees of Sansa is the Winter Queen.

The fear in her eyes is very real.

“You were kind to me,” Sansa says, surprising Margaery. On Sansa’s part, the words are familiar as ritual by now.

These are the words of the peace they are all stitching together, but underneath their polite words, they all remember who was there for them in the dark times.

And who was not.

“I remember,” Sansa says.

Margaery looks away, ashamed.

In her brown prison shift dress, with her bruised knees and thinning hair, she looks a small and filthy creature. Hardly human anymore.

Sansa’s fingers play gently around Margaery’s temples.

Truly, no matter the crime, Sansa is disgusted by what they have done to this woman who was once the pride of her house. Women suffer most in war, she knows, but particularly women like Margaery Tyrell. Long before Daenerys arrived, the Faith imprisoned her first, for daring to be a woman, and using her charms as she saw fit.

She has little enough of those charms left now.

Yet Sansa imagines that this rose could grow strong once more, given the chance.

“I’m so sorry, my love,” Margaery says then, her voice low as a swallow’s. Sansa has forgotten how very lovely that voice could be, sweet and sultry by turns, as required.

“’My love?’ Did you love me then?”

Sansa may be Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North now, but she cannot stop the sudden trembling that starts in her fingers.

The devastation in Margaery’s eyes is the only reply she needs.

“I’m so sorry,” Margaery says. It is a whisper. “We wanted to save you, but you vanished…”

Sansa swallows a lump in her throat.

“You knew where I was,” she spits at Margaery. “You had to.”

Tears start in her old friend’s eyes.

“We tried to get you to Highgarden,” she says, pleading again. “Littlefinger said if he didn’t have you, the deal was off. But we tried anyway.”

Sansa pauses.

She does recall a certain conversation with Olenna Tyrell at that feast, a lifetime ago, in which the old crone suggested Sansa come to Highgarden with her. She’d been baffled by the idea at the time; it was too late then for her to marry Willas. Even now, Sansa had never quite made sense of that conversation.

But if Margaery is speaking the truth…

“We tried, Sansa, I swear it,” Margaery says again, her shoulders shaking. “I swear it on my mother’s name. But you were gone before the feast was over, and even though we looked for you and Littlefinger as soon as we suspected what happened, we did not find you.”

The tears in Margaery’s eyes are rolling down in earnest now, hot on her face.

“I was in the Vale,” Sansa says distantly. She falls silent, remembering. Sometimes she stares into the looking-glass and the only girl who looks back is Alayne Stone.

Even now.

“You are the Lady of the Vale, now, I hear,” Margaery ventures.

Sansa smiles. Though she does not know it, hers is a cold and wolfish grin, and it has much of the North in it.

“And of the North too,” Sansa adds, like a septa chiding her ward.

“The North too,” Margaery says, and she smiles.

To Sansa’s disappointment, that smile has only pain and hunger and sadness in it now. She might as well be a stranger.

“And I am lady of nothing,” Margaery says.

She opens her hands in front of her, flexing thin, empty fingers.

Sansa leans closer to Margaery, inhaling that long-forgotten scent. Despite everything, she smells as good as Sansa remembers.

“No,” whispers Sansa, her breath hot in Margaery’s ear. “You’re the Queen of Thorns.”

The grin that breaks out on Margaery’s wasted face is startlingly bright, and a little wicked. Yes, here she is— Sansa finally recognizes her at last— her old friend, Margaery Tyrell, Lady Olenna’s protégé. She may have been imprisoned for the past two years, but she is herself still, alive and unbroken against all odds, just like Sansa.

“Sweet girl,” says Margaery, ruefully. “I loved you so. You must have known.”

“I always did.”

In the next moment, when their lips meet, in pure, devouring need, Sansa sends up a silent prayer to her father and his old gods.

_I’m sorry, Father, but she is the one I have chosen._

Brave, and gentle, and strong.

Somehow she does not feel that Ned Stark would disapprove in any way, at all.


End file.
